New Companies Offer New Green Solutions at GoingGreen

In the past few posts, I have written about a number of the panels at AlwaysOn GoingGreen and some of the companies that showed products there. But there were a number of other products, and here are some others I found interesting, ranging from solar energy to green materials to software and networking products.

In the past few posts, I've discussed the panels and companies at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference. Here are some of the products at the show that I haven't had a chance to discuss, ranging from solar energy to green materials to software and networking products.

Solar Print, an Irish company, showed its proposal for a dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC), which combines "artificial photosynthesis" on a printed sheet, to create a photovoltaic solution. Co-founder Roy Horgan said his technology allows for higher power density, even in relatively low-light systems. He compared the technology to traditional crystalline solar and said that while it's efficient today, it doesn't work well in small or low-light situations.

There were many biofuels companies, some I discussed earlier. Harry Hirschman of Conderos talked about the company's plan to create enzymes to produce cellulosic sugars. He noted how that a lot of ethanol companies have gone bankrupt as the price of corn has risen. Instead, Conderos has technology that lets yard trimmings and similar things be turned into ethanol. This critical technology was licensed from NASA. It uses municipal green waste without chemical pre-treatment. Hirschman said his first goal was an "entry market" creating fuel for propeller planes, which currently sells for $5 per gallon. The company hopes to move from that into the automotive market.

Wavebob has a solution for producing commercial electricity from ocean waves. CEO Andrew Parish said the company's technology is aimed at as oscillating system that runs in deep water, designed for large-scale installed power systems. Wavebob has been working on this for 10 years and has partnered with a number of larger vendors. It believes it needs about three more years of R&D, before it can move into commercial product development.

A couple of companies talked about new materials. Molly Morse of MangoMaterials talked about the company's plan to create a biopolymer using waste and methane, along with the company's unique biological process. The final product is a biopolymer than can be processed on standard plastic forming and molding equipment and initially sells for $2.75 a pound. This would create a replacement for current plastics which are petroleum-based and not biodegradable. The process is cheaper than creating traditional bioplastics. By using methane gas as the feedstock instead of sugar, she said the company could be the cleanest and cheapest solution. The product is also biodegradable. The company is looking for early stage funding to build a demonstration facility and a pilot plant.

Stramit has a product for converting straw into building boards. CEO Rory Faber said straw is produced as a byproduct of many agricultural products (like wheat or rice); and the final product is a building board that acts like a wall with better thermal and acoustic properties than current gypsum board. Faber said similar building boards have already been put in about 300,000 buildings in Europe. The material has also been US building code certified for fire, strength, and insets. But instead of selling the equipment, he wants to sell the building materials.

On the engine side, Intigreen has products designed to save energy and money for users of diesel engines. CEO Ken Johnson talked about the company's auxiliary power unit, a battery kit for things like air-conditioning for trucks. Essentially this seems like a replacement for traditional diesel-powered engines. It uses a combination of diesel and propane and is more efficient, thus saving money.

Alphabet Energy has created a silicon-based device for waste heat recovery, and CEO Matt Scullin said he wanted to sell these thermoelectric wafer devices to industrial customers. He says the devices can be produced for less than $0.20 per watt, much lower than current choices. It is designed to recover heat from factory furnaces in things like steel plants and similar operations. The technology is spun off from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and Alphabet enter has built prototype devices using older semiconductor manufacturing equipment, working like a fabless semiconductor company.

DHS, Ltd. talked about a platform called E-Yama designed to connect the energy profile of both your vehicles and your home. This is designed to take advantage of the fact that electricity costs vary at different times, and the fact that electricity can be traced so people could get control over what time they charge and what it will cost; and utilities can manage where the electricity is coming from.

As an IT guy, I was particularly interested in Automsoft's object oriented data collection platform, which is designed to handle real-time time-stamped data--the kind of information that gets generated in huge quantities but in relatively small data size. Company CEO, Paraic O'Toole, said this required a very different kind of database than the relational databases found in most business applications.

He said the company has a database, a platform for collecting them, and a business intelligence platform for analyzing the data. It is designed so it can handle up to 1,000,000 sets of data per second, can store up to 64 terabytes per database, and up to four billion databases. (He admitted these are theoretical numbers, as no real application is anywhere near that size.) Already, O'Toole said the company has 2,000 installations of its software, including most oil platforms and 8 of the top 10 life sciences companies. He was pitching it as particularly suited for lots of greentech environments where there are lots of individual instances, such as wind turbines or smart meters.

Jonathan Gale of Ether2 talked about "the Q," a distributed queue switch architecture, which I wrote about at the Demo conference a few weeks ago. He said that Ethernet is not an elegant solution, as it requires a central switch and the router. He added that the Internet has real problems scaling and that modifications will not solve it--instead the core of the network will need to be replaced.

The Q is based on technology from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and it has several partners. Initially, he said the Q would work with wireless sensors, replacing the layer two Ethernet connectivity, but fitting seamlessly. In this system, he said the whole network becomes a switch. Gales said it could "solve net neutrality, close the digital divide, and save huge amounts of energy." He was looking for seed capital to prove the technology.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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